Many current medicines suffer from poor absorption, distribution, metabolism and/or excretion (ADME) properties that prevent their wider use. Poor ADME properties are also a major reason for the failure of drug candidates in clinical trials. While formulation technologies and prodrug strategies can be employed in some cases to improve certain ADME properties, these approaches have failed to overcome the inherent ADME problems that exist for many drugs and drug candidates. One inherent problem is the rapid metabolism that causes a number of drugs, which otherwise would be highly effective in treating a disease, to be cleared too rapidly from the body. A possible solution to rapid drug clearance is frequent or high dosing to attain a sufficiently high plasma level of drug. This, however, introduces a number of potential treatment problems, such as poor patient compliance with the dosing regimen, side effects that become more acute with higher doses, and increased cost of treatment.
In some select cases, a metabolic inhibitor will be co-administered with an important drug that is rapidly cleared. Such is the case with the protease inhibitor class of drugs that are used to treat HIV infection. These drugs are typically co-dosed with ritonavir, an inhibitor of cytochrome P450 enzyme CYP3A4, the enzyme responsible for their metabolism. Ritonavir itself has side effects and it adds to the pill burden for HIV patients who must already take a combination of different drugs. Similarly, dextromethorphan which undergoes rapid CYP2D6 metabolism is being tested in combination with the CYP2D6 inhibitor quinidine for the treatment of pseudobulbar disease.
In general, combining drugs with cytochrome P450 inhibitors is not a satisfactory strategy for decreasing drug clearance. The inhibition of a CYP enzyme activity can affect the metabolism and clearance of other drugs metabolized by that same enzyme. This can cause those other drugs to accumulate in the body to toxic levels.
A potentially attractive strategy, if it works, for improving a drug's metabolic properties is deuterium modification. In this approach, one attempts to slow the CYP-mediated metabolism of a drug by replacing one or more hydrogen atoms with deuterium atoms. Deuterium is a safe, stable, non-radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Deuterium forms stronger bonds with carbon than hydrogen does. In select cases, the increased bond strength imparted by deuterium can positively impact the ADME properties of a drug, creating the potential for improved drug efficacy, safety, and tolerability. At the same time, because the size and shape of deuterium are essentially identical to hydrogen, replacement of hydrogen by deuterium would not be expected to affect the biochemical potency and selectivity of the drug as compared to the original chemical entity that contains only hydrogen.
Over the past 35 years, the effects of deuterium substitution on the rate of metabolism have been reported for a very small percentage of approved drugs (see, e.g., Blake, M I et al, J Pharm Sci, 1975, 64:367-91; Foster, A B, Adv Drug Res 1985, 14:1-40 (“Foster”); Kushner, D J et al, Can J Physiol Pharmacol 1999, 79-88; Fisher, M B et al, Curr Opin Drug Discov Devel, 2006, 9:101-09 (“Fisher”)). The results have been variable and unpredictable. For some compounds deuteration caused decreased metabolic clearance in vivo. For others, there was no change in metabolism. Still others demonstrated decreased metabolic clearance. The variability in deuterium effects has also led experts to question or dismiss deuterium modification as a viable drug design strategy for inhibiting adverse metabolism. (See Foster at p. 35 and Fisher at p. 101).
The effects of deuterium modification on a drug's metabolic properties are not predictable even when deuterium atoms are incorporated at known sites of metabolism. Only by actually preparing and testing a deuterated drug can one determine if and how the rate of metabolism will differ from that of its undeuterated counterpart. Many drugs have multiple sites where metabolism is possible. The site(s) where deuterium substitution is required and the extent of deuteration necessary to see an effect on metabolism, if any, will be different for each drug.